Query results: Miscellaneous

Just when you thought such a topic as the choice of a web host should be trivial matter…

1. Get down regularly. It’s surprizing how patient and forgiving customers can be when they like you, so although once every fortnight is good, increase to once a week from time to time.
2. When servers are down, don’t always give customers notice. Some of them won’t notice.
3. Give server status information on your web panel (”rebooting”, “running”) that may or may not relate the actual server status.
4. Don’t always answer customer e-mails, especially when they contain attempts at providing useful information.
5. On big downtimes (two to three days), apologize mostly by blaming the guy whom you bought defective servers from. Congratulate your team for bringing the servers back online.
6. Just call small downtimes “maintenance”. Use phrases such as “servers will be ‘paused’ for thirty minutes” three hours before 2h-blackout.
7. Never automatically re-fund customers. But let them know that if they suffered losses they can ask¹.
8. —this is the killer step— Repeatedly pride yourself on being intransigent and top-of-market about customer service.

Epilogue:

I am sad to report that we have lost countless hours with server difficulties over the last six months. Gustavo especially has been bravely battling with our downtimes, while I was naively calling for his patience untill things would improve. They never did. I feel guilty about having wasted a lot of our precious resources.

This week we have begun migrating to a fine southern-hemisphere web hosting company and it feels like we’re leaving the town circus. Things are going fine so far, and we will happily make an announcement when we are done.
Our apologies go to all those who have been affected, in particular translators.

1. Non-profit organizations? Nah, they’re not really customers. [↩]

We have not written much in the last weeks, due to a relatively high work load; but I wanted to share a few news about our work.

• First, the second GLM summit is over. Gustavo and myself were able to meet for 4 days in April, which allowed us to work on the roadmap for the current semester, as well as work out many technical decisions.
  We will write more about this, but the main priority that we defined was community growth. This translates into better community tools, more translations, measurement of website growth, more internal communication.
• Our lists of vendors selling GNU/Linux pre-installed computers are growing continuously, which is very encouraging. Both the French (LinuxPréinstallé.com) and English (LinuxPreloaded.com) websites show that things are getting brighter in the USA and in the EU.
• We have the great pleasure to note that translations of GetGNULinux.org are progressing nicely. At the time of writing, the Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian languages have over 20% of the website translated.

In the background, a myriad of technical improvements, exchanges within communities are getting us ready to grow faster.

Two good news in a single post,

The first is that Gustavo was contacted by a Panamean newspaper, El financiero, which was publishing an article on the “GNU/Linux vs. Windows” issue. He was quoted along with a local Microsoft spokesperson. Sadly, the article, which is written in Spanish, is no longer available online to non-subscribers.

The second is that another person joined the Advisory board of the GNU/Linux Matters organization. We wish a very warm welcome to Landy DeField, a long-time freedomware advocate, internet marketing consultant, who co-created the REVELinux gear shop and TheTuxProject.com (a little more on our who’s who page). We look forward to doing many things together =)